I’ve spent the last two weeks complaining about the weather. I was really looking forward to finally use my D7100 for some Hdr photography, but I don’t like to work on Hdr pics when the sky is gray, I find them boring even if the rest of the picture is interesting.

Today the sky looked reasonable. Around 30 minutes before sunset I decided to give it a try, so I packed everything, jumped on my bike and went to the park near home. Well, I GUESSED I packed everything.

As it turned out, I forgot a piece of my tripod at home. I cleaned my equipment a couple of days ago, and somehow the piece that locks the camera to the tripod was not in the bag. It was waiting for me on the desk back home.

Even though the picture I took is very simple, I enjoyed it a lot. I didn’t want to go back home, pick up the missing piece and ride back to the park, as I was afraid of missing the beautiful color of the sky. Usually I’d shot very few sets of 5x exposures a few minutes apart from each other, to experiment with the different colors in the sky. But the lack of the tripod meant that any of my sets could be compromised by camera shake, and there was nothing around me to use as a surface for the camera. In roughly 10 minutes I shot 34 sets of 5x exposures in order to maximize my chances of getting a well aligned set. The pictures that I chose to process come from only 4 exposures, the -2 was terribly unaligned so I had to sack it.

In the beginning I was shooting from a slightly different position few meters ahead and the tree on the left was not visible, leaving more space to the sky, but I found those pictures were missing something. So I tried to step back a bit, and then some more, and I do like the way those brunches contrast against the sky. There was also a guy in a blue jacket in the picture, took me a bit of time to remove him using Paint Shop.

It won’t be a memorable pic, but all things considered I’m very happy about the result.

The picture was taken with the kit lens 18-55 at f8, my Tokina 11-16 has not arrived yet, and I’m really looking forward to that.